Audrey is sitting in her chair by the fire, where she has been taking up one of her old worsted wool pinafores for Pink. It has been packed away for years among outdated patterns and ragbags of buttons and trim, but with a few alterations and a good airing, it should suit the little girl nicely. Going through her old trunks had soothed her after the awful fight with Henry, in the way only cherished girlhood things might. She reread letters written to schoolmates about young men who were not her fiancé; sighed over pressed roses from former darlings’ boutonnieres and scores of crowded dance cards. Poring over these little mementos served two purposes: first to balm her bruised self-esteem with the recollection of former triumphs, and second to make her feel vaguely traitorous, so that her better side might rush to her fiancé’s defense and repair the romantic treachery, even if committed only in memory. So she has spent the last hours sewing and remembering, putting Henry beneath all other lovers, then tearfully raising him up. Lost so long in dusty memories, she is quite disconcerted to be faced with a strange young lady—a “friend” of her fiancé’s of whom he has never made mention—observing her from the doorway. Shortsighted Audrey squints at the pale young woman, elegantly dressed as if having come straight from a party, and blushes at her own disheveled appearance.
“Good evening, Miss Potter,” Audrey offers, rising. “I fear I wasn’t expecting company.”
The newly christened Miss Potter, for her own part, is more than a little surprised by what she finds inside. She had expected to discover the privileged Miss Audrey Place perched upon a gold and pink chair, outfitted in her lamé turban and ostrich feather, earrings dimpling her lobes and matching necklace clasped around her long white throat; playing cards and sipping champagne maybe; or perhaps merely admiring herself in a hand mirror. Against the Audrey she constructed, it would be easy to walk in, say her piece, and leave. But the reality is so utterly different. Henry’s fiancée is dressed in a simple, patched yellow wrapper (which she put on for comfort once Henry and her godfather Clanny left), with her hair combed out and braided loosely down her back. Her weak eyes are still a bit red and swollen, from crying and doing fine needlework in low light, for Audrey did not think to light the lamp with just herself in the room, and instead squinted close to the dying fire. Her slippers are worn and stitched with tiny blush roses, so she does not go barefoot around the house; nor must she wear her outdoor shoes as lodgers are forced to do. The fact that Audrey’s oldest, most comfortable clothes are still so much finer than anything Gustine has ever owned herself is perhaps most disheartening of all.
“Please, do come in,” Audrey urges.
The room is as casually elegant as its occupant, with muted silver and green trellised wallpaper, gray wainscoting, and cheerful floral carpets scattered about. Nautical decorations, as befits a shipping fortune, grace every blank space, with no less than five studies of the Wearmouth Bridge (West View) upon one wall and portraits of schooners hung like revered members of the family upon the other. Even the marble mantelpiece recalls the sea, carved as it is with fishes and tridents and a smooth white anchor over its keystone. Upon it, in all its sentimental glory, sits the ubiquitous Sailor’s Tear, erupting with pink autumn mums to match the painted rim and handle.
“Let me just light the lamp.” Audrey says, removing a porcelain bowl perched on the lamp’s chimney and turning up the wick. “I apologize for the smell. We’ve been heating vinegar and cloves over it to keep away the cholera morbus.”
“Crimmons said you are a friend of Dr. Chiver? You must forgive my memory, and remind me where we’ve met?” Audrey asks disingenuously, for now that she can see her better, this young lady, with her crushed dress and scratched face, hardly looks like someone her fiancé would know. And why the silence, why the queer timing of this call?
“We’ve never met,” Gustine replies at last, in her most careful Fawcett Street voice. “But I thought we should speak.”
“Pray, don’t be mysterious,” says Audrey, meaning it, for her nerves can’t take much more of this. “Come sit down and take some tea with me.”
Gustine had not planned to sit and make conversation. Her rage was to sustain her in thrusting out the sailor’s bundle with a blunt explanation before coldly taking her leave. But seeing this girl so close to her own age, alone and vulnerable in this dim, silent room, has taken her aback a bit. With a guilty glance at The Sailor’s Tear she accepts the chair opposite Audrey, and tucks her package behind her skirts.
“Please pardon the mess,” Audrey nods to her sewing and the pillaged trunks at her feet. “I was taking up a dress for a little charity case I hope to rescue. She’s been raised like a heathen, and lives among the lowest of the low; but I’ve taken an especial interest in her and hope to do a bit of good. Won’t you have a cup?”
Miss Potter refuses with a shake of the head. “What do you have planned for your charity girl?” she asks.
“Oh, I’m not sure yet. She’s fit for nothing, I would daresay, though her father gives her all sorts of dreadful tasks. I think that’s half the reason I’m so attached to her. Her father is so cruel, whereas my father has always been so good to me.”
Here is your opening, thinks the dress lodger. Hand her the bundle. Do it now, she wills herself.
“Now, how do you know my Henry?” Audrey asks.
Gustine would like nothing better than to tell the truth, but the truth does not fit her plan. “He cured me of a fever,” she says flatly instead.
“Oh, a patient!” Audrey’s relief is palpable, for she had been feeling more than a little alarmed by this pale, disheveled woman, visiting after eleven at night. “You are much better, I hope?”
“Much,” replies Gustine. “We had our final consultation only hours ago.”
“You’ve seen him tonight?” asks Audrey eagerly, then quickly catches herself. “I’m afraid we had a bit of a row earlier, and I’ve been so desperate to apologize. How did he look?”
Gustine remembers the effigy Henry, falling to cinders before his house. “Not especially well,” she replies.
“I was afraid of that.” Unbidden, tears leak from Audrey’s already primed eyes, and all disloyal thoughts of other men are washed away. “My future husband is the gentlest man on earth,” she says, happy to speak well of him and make amends for her rebelliousness of earlier. “He desires only to do good in this world, and so often, I don’t comprehend how my careless actions might imperil his work.”
“How can you say that?” Gustine asks, unable to imagine any sort of rift between the doctor and this accommodating girl. “No matter what the consequences, surely he must appreciate such an act of heroism on your part.”
“You speak of the petition in today’s newspaper?” Audrey buries her face in her hands and weeps in earnest now. “Please don’t remind me of my wretched stupidity. I don’t know what possessed me to print that!”
“You didn’t mean it then?” asks Gustine.
“No, of course I meant it.” Audrey blows her delicate nose on an old scrap of fabric. “I honestly believe, Miss Potter, that the poor will never follow where the wealthy do not lead. We are educated, we are the rational and far-seeing. How can we expect the ignorant to move beyond superstition if we espouse it? But Dr. Chiver has shown me how misguided my methods were.”
And this poor girl doesn’t know the half of it, Gustine thinks. If she suspected that her petition was responsible for the riot even now raging, she would surely perish with grief. But this will not do, Gustine thinks, giving herself a shake. She did not come here to admire or sympathize with Audrey Place. She came here to make her pay.
“Has something happened to Dr. Chiver?” Audrey pales at the grim look on Miss Potter’s face.
Of course she would think of the one closest to heart and home. “No. Nothing has happened to the doctor,” Gustine replies, sparing her the knowledge of the riot. This is far more difficult than she expected. She planned this all out while she cleaned the mud from her dress and repinned
her disarrayed hair. Down by the river, she created a shared pain to take to Miss Place’s house. Now is not the time to weaken. “I have come because you and I have something in common,” she says.
“What is that?”
“Our fathers have both been long away at sea.”
“Yours too?” breathes Audrey. “Is it not awful being fatherless? Where is your father now?”
“In Riga,” replies Gustine.
“What a coincidence! So is mine!”
“I know. In fact, I have just tonight had news from there.”
“News of my father?” Audrey starts from her chair. “I can see it in your face. Please tell me—he is trapped behind the Quarantine there, and we’ve had no word for months.”
Gustine had practiced the speech on the way over: a dry account of Captain Place’s death, interjected with cold expressions of sympathy for the writhing agony he must have suffered before finally perishing alone in a strange land and being ultimately dumped at sea. Now that the time has come, however, she finds the speech dying on her lips. Audrey leans forward eagerly, feverish to hear what this stranger has to say, but Gustine’s carefully rehearsed words fail her.
“I met a sailor who was to give you the news,” Gustine says helplessly, speaking as she would to a friend, “but I thought it might be kinder coming from another woman.”
“Oh dear God, no.” Audrey shakes her head, knowing immediately from Gustine’s tone and expression what is meant. “No. No!”
“I am so sorry.”
“Father!” Audrey screams, throwing herself onto Gustine’s narrow bosom. Gustine’s own tears are still too close to the surface not to be affected by another’s weeping, and she finds herself struggling through the story the sailor told her: of cholera coming aboard ship, of the letter home the captain had in his hand when he died, and of his crew’s difficult journey back to Sunderland. The young girl but half-hears, sobbing in Gustine’s arms. Now that you have crippled her, finish her off, the voice of vengeance speaks in her ear. Reach down behind your skirts and present her the package. Take your delight in seeing her press the miasmic clothes to her tear-stained face, breathing in the deaths of continents. She belongs to him; she is one of them. Comfort not the woman you came to kill. Finish her off, Gustine.
But it is so very, very difficult. As many times as she tells herself she cannot be called a murderer, that the clothes were on their way here with or without her, she recognizes the workings of her own assassin heart. She could have interrupted the inevitable; life and death were in her power as surely as they have always been in Henry’s. And yet she has chosen death, for herself and the girl, as surely as Henry has always chosen it. Stop thinking this way, she wills herself. Present the bundle. Punish them. But even as Gustine fires herself, the tears of this poor fatherless girl dampen the flames. Were she only a little less trusting, a little more haughty; if she had only been wearing the matching earrings and necklace, the dress lodger could have gone through with it. But look at her—this girl does not deserve to die for Henry Chiver’s sins. She will suffer enough being married to him.
“I must go to my mother,” Audrey says, sitting up weakly and wiping her eyes. “How can I ever repay you?”
Gustine shakes her head, thoroughly ashamed of having come here. She has no more words, could not summon up the Fawcett Street platitudes of a Miss Potter if she tried. She hides the bundle behind her back, inching toward the door and the river, where she will destroy them for good. “I am sorry,” she whispers in the doorway, as much to her unavenged child as to the brokenhearted girl.
“You have been so kind to me!” Audrey jumps up impulsively and throws her arms around the retreating Gustine. Against the suddenness of the gesture, Gustine raises her hands to ward her off, and as she does so her package falls to the ground.
“You’ve dropped your parcel.” Audrey exclaims, swooping to retrieve it. “What is this?”
“Nothing.” Gustine reaches for it.
“No, wait! That is my father’s jacket. I sewed it myself. See here, the yellow stitching.” Audrey forgets her manners and swiftly unties the packet of clothes. “These are my father’s trousers. This is his shirt,” she says, inventorying the contaminated items. From his shirt pocket, where it was hidden to protect it from thieves, Audrey draws out her father’s gold watch and chain. She lifts it to her ear and listens as its hollow ticking fills the room. “Were you planning to leave with them?” she asks accusatorily.
“They are not safe,” Gustine stammers. “Please, miss, just throw them in the fire.”
“Throw out all that I have left of my father?” Audrey asks incredulously, burying her face in the sleeve of his jacket.
With a heavy heart, Gustine backs out of the parlour, leaving the girl to inhale her certain fate. It is what Gustine wanted, was it not?
Left all alone, Audrey rests her wet cheek against poor dear Papa’s abandoned clothes, too numbed by grief to feel anything, let alone the tickling itch of a solitary louse that leaves the warmth of her father’s pant leg for the new world of the daughter’s collar. Slowly, the bold explorer makes its way up her neck, along the slope of her ear, across her tundra of skull, coming to rest in the golden wilderness of her disheveled braid. Too numbed by grief, it’s not surprising Audrey doesn’t think of a silly saying we have around Sunderland, one taken as gospel by those who believe that when rooks feed in the street, a storm is at hand, or that the glass works, if not shut down once every seven years, will generate a salamander. If Gustine had been here, she could have told her what it is they say around Sunderland. Lice on a clean person spells a death. If you believe in old wives’ tales.
Are you giddy or anxious, madame? Do your fingers ache? Is there a burning pain in the pit of your stomach? Do you greatly thirst?”
The Eye stops before a bedraggled top-hatted impresario who, having set up outside the Theatre Royale to capitalize on the growing mistrust of crowds (not realizing fear had taken such hold that all events had been canceled), calls out to any passerby.
“What you need is a fine flannel cholera belt! Wrap it around your waist thuswise, to keep those vital parts warm, and cholera morbus will be stopped like the Frenchies at Waterloo. Or wait! If it’s not a belt you want, try these potent little packets.”
The impresario holds out two raggedly sewn calico squares that when clapped together produce a prodigious cloud of dust.
“Chloride of lime, madame,” he announces solemnly. “Touch ’em to everything: papers, doorknobs, money. Hold one in your hand when you shake ‘hello.’ Guaranteed to kill the cholera morbus on contact.”
The Eye reaches out for the packets and the cholera belt.
“Yes, the belt and the chloride will help, madame, but to be absolutely certain, you wouldn’t want to leave without purchasing a bottle of cholera drops. Put them in your tea, madame, put them in a glass of water. To tell you the truth, madame”—he leans and speaks in sotto voce, as if at this hour any but the frogs might hear—“I’ve found they work best stirred into a bumper of brandy.”
The Eye reaches out and takes the brown bottle of drops.
“I have candies, too, madame. And girdles lined with zinc. Pitch plasters for the back of your neck, guaranteed to be one hundred percent effective. Doctors use nothing else on their own mothers.”
Eye ties the wide flannel cholera belt around her thick waist and shoves the chloride of lime squares into her pockets. She uncorks the brown bottle and shakes a few bitter drops onto her tongue. Awful.
“That comes to eleven shillings four pence, madame. Surely a bargain to maintain good health. Wait! Where are you going, madame? Come back—you can’t take that without paying—”
But the Eye has left him payment in full, little does the impresario know. And all the remedies in the world won’t make change for the cold blue currency with which she’s paid.
Oh! Marrow, Oh! Marrow, Oh! What dost thou think?
The truth is that the Eye does feel
rather giddy and anxious. There is a burning pain at the pit of her stomach and she does greatly thirst. It is awful to feel this way right at the dawn of understanding what has eluded her all these many years. It is especially awful because in the course of her wandering tonight, she has been as close to happy as she’s ever been.
It all came clear that night in the snow, when she stood opposite the grieving mother, her own thick arms full of blue silk, faced with the mother’s armful of still blue child. In that snow-falling moment, when nothing sounded but the sob of east wind, there in that moment Eye realized that to guard something too well might be as bad as not guarding it well enough. Once when she was young, she followed the rat and thirty miners perished; then when she was old, she followed the dress and look what happened—the rat snuck in and stole away the baby. Like a little piece of horehound candy. What Eye realized as the dress sobbed herself sick and snow swaddled the cold body of the only child she’d ever held was that she was not born to be either a prisoner or someone else’s prison. She had failed the child, but she need not fail the mother. It was in her power to abandon her post. There are some holes better off not watched.
Oh! Marrow, Oh! Marrow, Oh! I’ve broken my bottle and spilt all my drink!
What would her life have been like if she’d never been set to watch a coal-mining shaft? She’s rarely wondered that, any more than she’s wondered what the world would look like seen through a matched set of eyes. And yet, if it was in her power to stop time in its coursing, she might pick a day, a day before any of this had ever happened, before she’d ever even seen a rat. She might pick a day when she was no older than Gustine’s tiny baby, and her eyes had not yet fallen on anything but her parents’ home and her mother’s firm pink breast. Everything was pleasantly out of focus back then, from the brick red blur of the low hearth to the marigold birse of her thatched roof, sifting inside with each hard rain. How much nicer life would have been had her eyes never sharpened the pickax features of her coal miner father or discovered the blancmange resignation in her mother’s face. If only her world had remained out of focus, what sort of myopic paradise could have been hers?